Record Play Pause

by Stephen Morris

  The thing was, I was supposed to be taking my O levels in a year, and where would that be happening then? First port of call for resuming my education was Macclesfield College. Unfortunately, my co-exiles Phil and Adam had got there first and the powers that be felt that two was a nice round number of drug fiends, thank you.

  Next stop, Wilmslow County Grammar School. A resounding no from them. They had a zero-tolerance policy on drugs and stupidity.

  I was all for just getting a job, any kind of job, but preferably one where there was no work at all involved, that kind of job. Oh, and one where you didn’t need any qualifications. Mum and Dad were having none of it. They would get me into a place of learning if it was the last thing they did.

  So one day I was taken for a bit of a drive by my dad. Like an unwitting dog being rehoused, I was taken off on a trip to Audenshaw. I had no idea where the hell Audenshaw was, but it seemed to take ages to get there. Our destination turned out to be Audenshaw Grammar School, a seat of learning located on the other side of Stockport, towards Ashton-under-Lyne. There was the usual neatly trimmed playing field at the front, and the mingled smell of the sweat of youthful males and floor polish pervaded the interior. Up a flight of well-trodden stairs, along a hushed corridor to a door with three chairs outside. We sat.

  ‘Not again! Why the fuck are we here?’ I hissed.

  Clifford went in first to see the man in charge and explained my situation. I was then summoned and asked by the head bloke, ‘Do you want to come to this school?’

  To which I replied, ‘No I don’t! It’s miles from where I live and I can’t see the point anyway.’ Which was not the answer he was looking for.

  ‘Well, I’m afraid I have some rather bad news for you: you start on Monday,’ replied the head twat. I’d taken an instant dislike to him and his place of learning. He thought me feckless and lazy, and he was probably right. We parted on bad terms.

  To get to Audenshaw I had to first catch a train to Stockport, then another to Guide Bridge, then walk across a lot of marshy waste-ground and there it was . . . looming. I was usually late. Going to Audenshaw felt like banishment to Siberia. I would board the train full of commuters reading paperbacks and by the time I got to Guide Bridge, I was alone in the carriage, ready for my trek across the muddy wasteground to the gulag.

  One thing I enjoyed about Audenshaw was its Religious Education classes. These were great, completely ignoring the Bible and going straight in there with demonic possession and stigmata, and I’m sure there was even mention of a poltergeist. It was as if the course had been written by the blokes who did ‘Focus on Fact’ or someone who’d read a lot of Charles Fort. There was a bit of Buddhism and witchcraft – the life of the apostles didn’t feature.

  A bad thing about the place was the cadet corps. They would dress up in military drag and march up and down with pretend rifles, doing drill and stuff like some warped teenage Dad’s Army.

  A few years earlier this would have been right up my street, playing at soldiers with toy rifles. But since I felt I was now a fully paid-up member of the counterculture, all this establishment shit was not for me. Unless they needed a drummer, of course, then maybe I would ha ve considered it.

  One morning, late again, the bloke who ran the cadets caught me skulking in the cloakroom. His eyes lit up when I explained the trouble I had getting to school each morning.

  ‘I think I have a solution for you, young man. I live in Hazel Grove and if you could manage to get there at six-thirty I’d gladly give you a lift in my car. I haven’t seen you at cadets yet. Would you like me to show you round? We have a jolly old time.’

  I had no idea what sort of a jolly time a young man could have with a pretend rifle, and I didn’t much want to find out.

  After that encounter, I decided that I would be leaving Audenshaw at the earliest opportunity. There was no way I was going to be indoctrinated into some Mancunian version of the Hitler Youth. I might be being a bit unfair to Audenshaw here, but I felt isolated and banished – I hated pretty much everything and everybody at that time. There were some good lads at the school (a couple of them later ended up in a band called V2) and I did become a member of the Syd Barrett Appreciation Society thanks to one.

  I began to stay on the train until it got to Manchester, and phone up the school pretending to be my dad. I would explain that I was ill and wouldn’t be in for some time. I’d spend the rest of the day wandering around record stores and bookshops, trying to make five cigs last all day. I felt like I was being stalked by that big black cloud. Home was one screaming row after another. I felt better outside in Manchester, mooching in the rain and stewing in my thoughts. This truly felt like banishment.

  My roundabout self-education away from school was ongoing. I was beginning to read more non-fiction books and would grab anything that seemed to have the scent of Zen, some kind of esoteric philosophy or a hint of the occult about it. I guess it started with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a bestseller at the time, but I think I found the repeated use of the term ‘a priori’ off-putting. I really liked Alan Watts’s The Way of Zen though. All this was mixed up with some books I’d pick up from the House on the Borderland, a little alternative bookshop on Tibb Street, where I would usually start my Manchester skiving sessions.

  The bookshop was named after a supernatural horror novel by William Hope Hodgson and run by a guy called Dave Britton. His main income came from the sale of hardcore porn and it was quite funny to watch these guys coming in, trying to look casual as they nervously browsed the filth section, just a shelf along from the sci-fi stuff. I think Burroughs and Ballard was the dividing line between the two.

  I’d spend all morning in there but, perhaps surprisingly for a teenage boy, I wasn’t there for the porn. I was angling for a job in the shop or maybe could pick up some drugs-related info as I whiled away the time browsing through the shunned Necronomicon and books about Magick, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley. Anyone who got billed as the wickedest man who ever lived was bound to have something interesting to say. It was fascinating gobbledygook.

  Then I’d go and hang about in Piccadilly Plaza for a bit, reading the latest ZigZag (Pete Frame’s ‘Rock Family Trees’ were always a favourite), have a coffee in the Wimpy. Then I’d spend the rest of the day visiting record shops – Virgin, HMV, Rare Records and Black Sedan.

  I loved Black Sedan. It had a huge stock of bootlegs – multicoloured vinyl treasures in homemade Xeroxed sleeves. The rock-androll equivalent of home-brewed ale, their reputation and rarity promised so much and usually delivered so little. It didn’t stop me wanting them badly. I never had enough cash though.

  If I did have any money (and if I did, I’d probably nicked it), I’d go and see a band in the evening just to avoid going home (any band would do). I saw Jeff Beck that way. He was good and Gentle Giant weren’t as bad as I thought they’d be, while Humble Pie were ace. Or I’d go and sit through the double feature of Easy Rider and Woodstock again, or the movie of Moorcock’s The Final Programme. It was nowhere near as good as the book, of course.

  As soon as I turned fifteen I made it official. I announced to my parents that I wasn’t going to school any more. Thanks to some quirk of the law at that time, I could just jack it in and leave with no comebacks from the police or social services. So I left. Not a single O level to my name. Nothing. Nada. That’d teach ’em to try and educate me. (I did nick a load of poetry books from the library though – I still have them.)

  Needless to say, this didn’t go down well at home. How my parents refrained from killing me I’ll never know.

  My masterplan was that I would hitch down to London and get into a band. There were always loads of drummer-wanted ads in the music papers, but there was a problem: they all came with the caveat ‘must have own transport’. Somehow I didn’t think having a bicycle with a puncture would count.

  Newly liberated from scholastic drudge, I took to hanging around in pubs ful
l time. Most landlords were either very tolerant of the fact that I was only fifteen or they were nearly blind. As is only natural, I made some new friends – drug fiends to a man. Chief among these was Dizzy. He had what you might call an open house/commune/squat and when the pubs shut a few of us would go round there for a spliff or whatever was on offer. There was one guy, Dobbo (not to be confused with Hobbo – this one had much shorter hair and was unpredictably violent), who specialised in burglary and vandalism, and liked to combine the two when breaking into chemist’s or doctor’s surgeries. He always seemed to have a pocketful of pills, usually assorted, but with no real idea of what they were save for the knowledge that they came from an alarmed cabinet marked ‘Dangerous Drugs’. They helped make the time pass quicker.

  The problem as always was money, or the lack of it.

  I had thought that Dad might take me on doing odd jobs at his office, at least I had some experience of that, but he wouldn’t entertain the idea. I was always scrounging bits here and nicking bits there and generally making myself unpopular at the best of times, so it wasn’t really surprising that he didn’t want to know me.

  Eventually Uncle John (Elsie’s husband) took pity and said he’d give me a trial working at Atwell and Jenner’s mill where he was a manager. It was bloody hard work. Well, when you’ve never done a proper day’s work in your life, any work seems hard. I was shifting huge rolls of fabric on to massive cutting tables, then slicing it into sheets to get it loaded onto the looms. The machines made a great noise when they all got going, a really powerful, insistent, industrial rhythm. It was a proper northern job, ‘working int’ mill’. I got myself a cloth cap – I did really – but I thought the clogs might have been pushing it a bit. The pay wasn’t great but it were better than nowt, as they say.

  What cash I managed to save after drug and alcohol deductions went mostly on the acquisition of more drums, records, gigs and my new favourite thing, festivals.

  7

  THE GREAT VINYL ROBBERY

  Fancy a game of Where’s Wally? I’m actually in this snap somewhere.

  I had already played with addiction, but now I became a genuine vinyl junkie. I would tour record shops doing the vinyl flip-flip thing, pausing to restore dislocated items to their correct alphabetic position. I would have a shopping list in my head, built from reviews of the latest releases by new bands I thought might be interesting, bands that John Peel had being playing that month, names of groups that I’d spotted in ZigZag or Cre em. Sometimes I would be attracted to LPs just because I liked the look of the sleeves, and I was drawn to stuff on labels I liked: United Artists, Harvest or Zappa’s Straight. Finally, I would be looking for the two most important categories of all: US imports and long-deleted or scarce records that the shop’s previous clientele had missed. American imports were highly prized. US record companies would often put out LPs before they were available in the UK, and the American breed usually came in sturdier sleeves than their British cousins. They came at a premium but I’ll swear a lot of them actually sounded better too.

  You could find black gold in the most unlikely places. A paper shop in Macclesfield had a first edition of The Velvet Underground & Nico with the peel-off banana intact – until a young child tore half of it off. Sacrilege! In Manchester, the record sections of the Kendal Milne department store were a good place to trawl. Lurking among The World of Mantovani and Tom Jones’s Greatest Hits, I found the first Stooges album, Permanent Damage by the GTOs and Farewell to Aldebaran by Judy Henske and Jerry Yester. Rare Records – where Ian Curtis used to work but I didn’t remember him – occasionally had gems but you had to be quick. Procrastination cost me the first Jobriath album and, more annoyingly, International Heroes by Kim Fowley. I spent years after that trying to find a decent copy of International Heroes that did not cost an arm and a leg. I only found it a few years ago courtesy of the internet and, honestly, it felt like cheating. For me it was the searching and hunting down – refusing anything other than a mint first pressing with gatefold sleeve and lyric sheet – that was the best part of record buying. Today I can find all my coveted teenage 33s on Discogs or some other website in a couple of clicks. The thrill of the vinyl chase is no more.

  I would leave the shop with my latest acquisition in its paper bag (if I hadn’t nicked the record), before getting it home to the hi-fi, gently peeling off the piece of Sellotape securing the bag, sliding out the sleeve and thoroughly inspecting the contents. I would slip Side A on to the turntable, drop the needle and sit back, bathed in a warm glow of the run-in crackle then, wham, the heat of satisfaction or disappointment. From the first one-two-three-four of the Modern Lovers ‘Roadrunner’ I knew I’d struck gold. Same with the MC5’s Back in the USA. Other times, though, just a hot and deflating feeling that I might have been conned. Oddly, it was often the records that initially seemed a dead loss that would eventually become the most enduring.

  After leaving Audenshaw I continued going to gigs on my own. Keeping out of the house for as long as possible seemed like a good idea.

  Mainly it was at venues in Manchester city centre – the Free Trade Hall, of course, but occasionally bands would opt for the plusher theatres such as the Opera House (Genesis) or the Palace Theatre (Pink Floyd, the Kinks), or the not-so-posh such as the tiny Houldsworth Hall on Deansgate (Peter Hammill).

  Slightly further afield were shows at Manchester University or UMIST and the Apollo at Ardwick, which is probably the only venue from those days that remains to this day. Bigger bands such as the Who or the Stones seemed to prefer the King’s Hall at Belle Vue.

  The smaller venues were always the most interesting and, typically, the most difficult for me to get to. This necessitated scrounging a lift off someone and/or a long walk/hitch home. The Stoneground in Gorton was housed in an old fleapit of a cinema (it was renamed the Mayflower, scene of a couple of early Joy Division gigs). The price of drinks seemed to change by the hour. The audience would either sit crosslegged and appreciative at the front of the stage, or take part in some wide-eyed freaky dancing at the back, under the blacklight. The clientele was nearly as fascinating as the bands. I saw Magma but missed out on Can and Amon Düül – to my everlasting shame.

  The newest and allegedly purpose-built venue was the Hardrock near Old Trafford cricket ground. You could smell the newness. The Hardrock, despite its location, was a great place to see a band. It didn’t have that stale-beer-stained carpet fragrance that was the hallmark of a venue steeped in history. I saw Bowie there a couple of times, Genesis (again) and Hawkwind (of course) on the Space Ritual tour in November 1972. Now that was a fantastic show. The oddest bill, possibly of all time, was at the Hardrock: Lou Reed and the Tots supported by Fairport Convention and Phillip Goodhand-Tait. A very peculiar line-up, mixing the extremes of the English village and the American city. But there wasn’t the same rigid categorisation of music back then. It was all one thing under the broad heading of ‘Rock’.

  The journey home from gigs in Manchester was broken by a spot of supper at Manchester legendary all-night Plaza Café. The Plaza only served one dish: the Biryani. It was usually served as a half – to ask for a full biryani was the height of gluttony. The standard meal was advertised as chicken, although having witnessed a crate of scraggy, greyish birds being delivered late one night, pigeon may have been a better description. (There was also an undefined ‘meat’ option, but I never met anyone who tried it.) The bright sunshine-yellow rice and ‘chicken’ was served on a plastic plate with a bowl of sauce, available in varying levels of mouth-melting intensity: Mild, Medium, Red Hot, Suicide or Killer. Later, they added Atomic to the list for the hardened connoisseur. Half a Suicide, my usual, cost under 25p, about all I’d have left after a night out. I seem to remember that Charlie the owner and the Somali staff wore industrial-grade wellington boots for some reason, perhaps to protect their feet if they accidentally stepped in the corrosive sauce.

  Eventually I broadened my horizons from the indoor late-nig
ht event to become a solo all-day damp festival-goer.

  Buxton 1973 was one of the first ones. It was only 11 miles up the road from Macclesfield, so it was easy to cadge a lift.

  I’d gone mainly to see the Edgar Broughton band and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band. I was also quite looking forward to seeing the Groundhogs. Unfortunately, fearing for their safety in the teeming rain, they didn’t bother playing. Roy Wood didn’t fancy the rain either and beat a hasty retreat along with the rest of Wizzard.

  To put it mildly, it was grim. The site was bleak enough and the pissing rain and cold topped it off a treat. It was like a Derbyshire Altamont with more rain. Following what had become a seventies tradition at these sort of gigs, the Hells Angels decided to take over the festival security. They’d done it the year before and it was now an annual day out for them.

  I knew some bikers in Macc and though they were an unpredictable bunch, I’d never had any trouble with them. The Devil’s Disciples, as the Macc chapter called themselves, only had a moped between the four of them. They were surprisingly easy-going, unlike Macc’s skinheads, whom I always managed to offend in ways that I failed to understand – usually earning me a good kicking.

  The Buxton Angels tried to extort money from the punters who wanted to use the toilets, but somehow this was more sad than scary. They did attempt a bit of drunken rampaging, but with the cold and damp, I don’t think their collective heart was really in it.

  Headliner Chuck Berry soon cleared off after an en masse Angels duckwalk invasion ended his short set. You could see his tail-lights bouncing across the moor as the audience bayed.

  Buxton the year after, 1974, was better. Thanks to windowpane acid, ginger wine, dry ice and Mott the Hoople, it was brilliant! Even the Angels smiled! We certainly knew how to have fun in those days.